14.0 Scheduling Jobs

Designer has a job scheduling utility to schedule events, such as setting the system to disable an account on a specific day, or initiating a workflow to request an extension for a person’s access to a corporate resource. You can do the following:

Create a Job object from an installed job definition.
Define when a job is to run, which servers the job is to run on, the scope of the job in terms of eDirectory objects, and the job reports for intermediate and final results.
Set values for the job’s parameters, its description, and display name.
Enable or disable a job, manually start a job, stop a job that is running, and display a list of running jobs.

Figure 14-1 High-level view of Job Scheduler process

The Job Scheduler consists of the following principal components:

Job Manager: Identity Manager includes a Job Manager that is responsible for launching scheduled jobs. It runs in the background on each Identity Manager server and checks every minute to see if a job needs to run, based on the job definition. When it encounters one, it runs the appropriate Job Implementation.

Job Object: The Job Object you create in Designer contains all the information necessary to invoke the job. It includes the name, description, schedule, server list, and XML job definition.

Job Definition: The Job Definition is an XML description of all the parameters necessary to perform a specific job, including the Job Implementation used to actually perform the job on the target servers. The Job Definition is an XML attribute associated with the Job Object.

Job Implementation: The Job Implementation is typically a JAR file that contains the java classes that perform the job on the target Identity Manager server. Each server where you want a job to run must have a copy of the Job Implementation file. At the designated time, as specified in the Job Definition, Job Manager runs the Job Implementation to perform the job.